Newport!

Oh I love our annual trip to Newport Beach and it just gets better and better every year. Eve and Rose loved being with their cousins in the sand, digging for sand crabs with grandpa, playing in the water with their daddy, and going to get donuts in their pajamas for breakfast. Beach babies through and through.

Ben couldn't stay the whole week and left on Wednesday to get back to work and I hated seeing him go. The plan was to drive home in the minivan with my sisters and all the girlies on Saturday but we didn't make it very far. We hit a tire tread that was in the middle of the road about 45 minutes outside of Baker, CA. It broke something underneath the car and our air conditioning went out. It was 107 degrees outside and that van got HOT, FAST. All the little girls in the back were red cheeked and sweating, rubbing cold baby carrots against their cheeks and by the time to we got to the gas station in Baker we were all about to lose it. Hoping it was just a matter of recharging the A/C, we corralled all the kids at rest stop for over an hour while a mechanic looked at it and gave us terrible news. He couldn't fix it and said that we would have to go on to Vegas, where if we found someone to do it, it would be a 3-4 hour repair. Nightmare.

Then my super hero dad single-handedly unpacked and re-packed all of the luggage from both cars in that insane heat and got all the luggage into the minivan and somehow got all the car seats into the Pilot. My mom, my 2 sisters, me and all four kids drove home comfortably while he toughed it out in the oven car for the the next 10 hours home. Holy cow...I'm so grateful for good men in my life that step up and do unthinkable things to rescue the people they love. Thanks dad.